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Shumate said. “In two days’ time, he was dead.”
    “No idea who the bearded kid was?”
    “Dawson’s business is renting and leasing film equipment. You know that, I suppose. Quite often Christian filmmakers come to him. He’s known for giving them discounts. Since this young fellow sat through the service, I thought his connection to Jerry might be that. He could have been an actor.” Shumate shrugged. “Director? I don’t know. It’s hard to judge people by their appearance anymore.”
    “His partner might know.” Dave stood up. “Thanks for your time.” Shumate rose and they shook hands. Dave went to the door, opened it, and turned back. “One more thing. Did he make any extra donations lately?”
    “No.” Shumate cocked an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”
    “In the last two months, his bank records show he wrote a check for seven hundred dollars and another for three hundred fifty. Not part of his banking pattern.”
    Shumate scratched an ear. “I don’t know,” he said.

4
    D AVE PARKED IN A lot with the laughable name Security half a block below Hollywood Boulevard. Smells of onion, garlic, Parmesan, were thick in the hot air because the kitchen door of Romano’s stood open. The old brick had been painted white. Iron barred the windows. He walked out the alley to the street front where the windows had cute green shutters and boxes of geraniums. He paused under a striped sidewalk canopy, thought about a drink, changed his mind. He passed a house-plant boutique, a jazz club with black shutters, a staircase door marked with the names of dentists, a place that hired out tuxedos, and came to the wide plate-glass front of SUPERSTAR RENTALS CINE & SOUND .
    Inside, red camera cranes reached for a ceiling hung with spotlights large and small, round and square. Dollies squatted on thick wheels on a broad floor of vinyl tiles. Microphone booms glittered. There were movieolas, tape recorders, portable and immovable; there was equipment he couldn’t put a name to. Cables and cords snaked underfoot. Long-haired youths in bib overalls and straggly moustaches explored the chrome-plated undergrowth. A pale girl in a wrinkled floor-length dress and sandals clutched a clipboard and checked items off a list with a felt pen. All of them whined and neffed at each other and at a resigned, rumpled, obliging bald man who led them to this corner and that, and kept rummaging out for them this scruffy substitute, that battered one. Dave asked him:
    “Jack Fullbright?”
    “Office,” the bald man said, and jerked a thumb at a door beyond a glass counter filled with lenses and microphones on velvet. To reach the door, Dave had to step over a stack of empty thirty-five-millimeter reels. Then he was in a long room where more equipment stood around under weak fluorescent light gathering dust, or lay on steel shelves gathering dust. The aisle between the shelves was made narrow by strapped black wooden cases made for toting film onto and off of jets. Stickers on the boxes showed they’d been to Japan, India, and Beirut, to Spain and Iraq and Yugoslavia. Stacks of film cans also narrowed the aisle, and stacks of brown fiberboard boxes for mailing film reels.
    At the end of the aisle a glass box of light was labeled OFFICE. He opened the door and typewriter chatter met him. A young woman who looked like most of the young women on the fronts of magazines these days stopped typing and gave him a smile that by the tiny lines it made in her sun-gilt skin said she wasn’t going to be young a lot longer. The wrinkles in the J. C. Penney cheap-rack granny dress of the girl out front had come from sleeping in it. The wrinkles in the loose, unbleached cotton top this young woman wore had cost her the way the trendiest fashions always cost. Her hair was an artfully uncombed tumble of frizz. It was the color of the lenses of her big glasses—amber. Except that in the lenses, the amber turned smoky toward the top. Her voice was warm and